We recently noted the challenges facing Motorola, as it's been unable to continue to innovate in a way that customers desire in the handset business. Unfortunately, it looks like Motorola is choosing the all-too-common strategy among those who fail in the marketplace: they start suing for patent infringement. Motorola has now decided that since it hasn't been able to beat RIM's Blackberry in the marketplace, it's simply going to sue the company for patent infringement instead. Of course, as in any good patent nuclear war, RIM has fired back with its own patent infringement countersuit, meaning that both companies will be tied up with lawyers and judges, throwing away money that could have gone towards actually innovating and actually competing in the marketplace.

Last year when RIM's Blackberry service had a major outage, the company blamed a software upgrade, which made many folks question why RIM would be doing a major software upgrade in the middle of the week. Since most Blackberry users are corporate users, it would seem to make sense to do upgrades over the weekend -- or at least late at night. So, with this latest outage, it's a bit surprising to see RIM fall back on the old "software upgrade" excuse again. The company doesn't say that's definitely what happened, but suggests that's what caused it, failing to explain why the company would run an upgrade in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.

Last April, RIM woke many Blackberry users up to the idea that they might be Crackberry addicts by having the system go offline for a few hours overnight. It's amazing how people recognize just how dependent they are on a service once it goes away. The eventual excuse given by RIM (a botched software upgrade) was unconvincing. However, there hadn't been any more outages, so questions about the service died down. However, with widespread Blackberry outages Monday afternoon, lasting about three and a half hours, impacting all mobile operators, some of those questions are going to be raised again. The Blackberry system involves all traffic going through RIM machines, and a cascading problem across those machines can certainly cause quite a bit of trouble. At some point, people are going to start asking if there isn't a more robust, distributed way of offering a Blackberry (or Blackberry-like) service that would be more immune to these types of issues.

While we're often quite critical of frivolous trademark lawsuits that are clearly designed to to shut someone up or to try to squeeze money out of someone, there are times when trademark lawsuits are quite well justified. As we've said repeatedly, the real purpose of trademark law isn't about "intellectual property" at all -- but rather, it should be viewed as a consumer protection law. That is, it's really designed to keep Bob's Cola from packaging its bottles up so that people are tricked into thinking they're buying Coca Cola. So, with that in mind, it would seem that RIM has a pretty strong trademark case against handset maker LG, who has been trying to sell new phones with names like Black Label, Strawberry and Black Cherry. The "Black Label" one is more borderline -- as it's hard to see that RIM should be able to control the use of the word "Black" as it relates to any mobile device. However, it's not hard to see people hearing names like Strawberry and Black Cherry on a mobile device and simply assuming that they're somehow related to RIM's BlackBerry. Even worse, LG had apparently wanted to call one of its new devices the BlackPearl -- which is really sketchy, seeing as RIM is offering a device called the BlackBerry Pearl. On this one, we'd say that even the moron in a hurry test suggests that people would be confused into thinking that some of these LG phones were from RIM.